Tuesday, October 02, 2012

Real life

Over the weekend, a freshman at RU was beaten to death, in her dorm room, by her boyfriend from back home.

I didn't know her, and most of what I know about the situation comes from published news reports, which themselves don't have much to say: just names, ages, photos. (I won't link. If you must know, you can find the story on Google in one three-hundredth of a second.) If there was a motive, no one knows it. But who the fuck knows why a man kills his intimate partner? Even when there's a reason, there isn't a reason.

We mystify and romanticize and infantilize college students, even those of us who teach them--imagining their lives as uniquely free, uniquely sheltered, and even over-sheltered (for all the talk about helicopter parents, I've never actually met one). But our students live in the real world as fully as we do. Sometimes it's realer than we can imagine.

oh, how terrible. And yes, students aren't sheltered, but we want their lives to be simpler than they are. And when something like this happens, it ripples -- some of your students will have known her, many will be worrying.